It’s been another busy week on the homestead. This morning we’ve been busy preparing for the pekin ducks that will arrive next week! Look forward to some delicious, healthy pastured duck meat to be available around the beginning of May. Love for Whispering Willow Lip Balm I recently tested the Whispering Willow Lip Balm we […]

We have our beehives in our chicken run, and some people have asked how the bees and chickens get along. Beekeepers said the hens would eat the bees, and others worried if the bees would harass the hens. We have found that the bees and the hens don’t interact at all. Then hens go all […]

We enjoyed some warm weather this weekend. With temperatures tipping over 50 degrees the bees emerged for a break from the hive. They were flying around the hive checking on things so we took the opportunity to check on them. Since we are expecting several more days of warmth we put a third of the […]

Some mixed news to report on our bees. It has been a while since we last posted and a lot has happened. This Fall we suffered a dearth of nectar in our region and the bees were not able to build up much honey reserves. Even early in the Fall the hives were both suffering. The hive that was growing the most during the Summer months and having the most problems with crooked comb was also doing the worst of the two hives. They seemed to have spent too much time building comb and not enough time gathering nectar and building up their honey reserves. Subsequently their population must have grown too large and they ran out of all their honey before it even got really cold around here.

We needed to melt down the beeswax in the comb so that we could use the wax for candles and other potential crafts. George did some research, and found that it was common to use solar ovens to do this. We had been wanting a solar oven for other reasons so it was a good opportunity to go ahead and build a solar oven!

As I embark on a candle making adventure, I picked up Candle Making in a Weekend by Sue Spear to pickup some pointers. This book was a good overview of candlemaking. It had instructions for a wide range of projects. The instructions were simple and easy to understand, plus there were helpful pictures. I feel […]

As we were beginning this homesteading adventure, I read Made from Scratch by Jenna Woginrich. This book was not worth reading. It was all I could do to finish it, and I would not recommend it. The biggest issue I have with this book is how the author writes about mistakes that she made, but […]

This past weekend we finally got a chance to do another inspection on our hives. We were surprised at how built up the comb had gotten in the 2 weeks since we had done a full inspection. It was so built up that it became a problem in some parts as the bees had developed comb that went off sideways and into comb from neighboring top bars! This is a pretty common problem with top bar hives but we thought we were ok since our last several inspections showed them staying in line on the top bars, but over the last two weeks or so they went crazy building comb and some got a bit out of alignment. The result was as we lifted up one top bar the crooked comb would break off from the next top bar.

Our bees were spotted covering the front of the outside of their hive this weekend (called bearding) and we made a decision about our hens. So we wanted to share a quick video update on the bees and hens.

It looks like Concord hive is back on track so we will be leaving it alone for another week or two before doing another full inspection. Since it looks so good we did not put in the feeder like we thought we might have to last week either.

It had been a little over two weeks since our last full inspection of the hives. We didn’t feel we had to do a full inspection since there’s been lots of activity in both hives, but we did want to make sure they had ample space to expand comb if needed.

The last few days there have been a very large number of bees flying around the entrance of our Lexington hive (the strongest based on comb development and brood count during inspections). During the day the entrance is covered in bees and the air in front and above the hive is dense with bees.

It finally happened, we are totally caught up on our beekeeping progress with our website! Today we did an inspection on both hives and instead of snapping a bunch of photos we decided to make a video of the experience. We’ve split the video into two parts, the first of our Lexington hive, and the […]

Its now been about three weeks since we first installed our bees and I wanted to share with you how they are doing. We were a little apprehensive after first getting them installed because we went on vacation for a week three days after installing them and worried something might happen while we were gone […]

Yes, my engineering side shows in this article’s title, what can I say? The day our bees arrived we took off work early to drive down to Virginia Bee Supply to pick up our two packages and equipment. Picking out our packages was a very unceremonious process, we gave our names and then were told […]

Being new to beekeeping, the most sure fire way to get bees for our hives was to order packages of bees from a bee supplier. Some people order them through the mail, we were fortunate to have a local beekeeping supply company near us in Northern Virginia called Virginia Bee Supply. They bring packages of […]

UPDATE December, 2014: It seems this page has been picked up on several other websites. Some people have had questions and concerns about the purpose and use of this setup. This setup was planned for use in a small backyard when we lived in a townhouse. The intention never was to have the chickens confined under […]

If you’ve been following our series on Beekeeping you know that we now have two fully assembled barrel top bar bee hives. We even had them nicely positioned on some left-over pavers from our patio project. As you can see they look pretty good and could be fully functional at this point. But Martha and […]

Martha and I would like to share with you our experience building our own Barrel Top Bar Hives (TBH). This is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial, but rather a general overview of the steps we took and lessons learned during the process,. There are plenty of excellent step-by-step tutorials out on the internet […]

You may recall that we decided on Top Bar Hives for our homestead, but beyond the general category of hives we still had to pick an actual design and find or create some plans. Some of the options were all wood top bar hives that look like miniature Noah’s Arks. Others are designed to be […]

If you are at all like us, when you hear about beekeeping you think little white boxes stacked alongside a field filled with buckets of honey. It turns out those bee hives have a name: Langstroth Hives. They are great for large scale commercial beekeepers, as well as people who want the convenience of a […]

Martha and I were talking one day about ways we can become more self-sufficient and got to thinking about bees. We knew very little about bee keeping initially (and are still by no means experts), but what we did know that bees help pollinate plants (so good for our garden), they produce honey (a tasty treat), and that […]